How can I keep my home?

With Auntie Agatha

gataedo@yahoo.com, agatha.edo@gmail.com Tel: 08054500626

Dear Agatha,

I’m 42 and very lucky to have gotten a man who married me last year. His first wife died about three years ago in an accident. He is 55 and has two children who are undergraduates.

I have lived a very careless life but meeting him changed so many things about my attitude to life.

Although I still have some of my old friends but I’m careful since I got married of what I discuss with so many of them who ironically are married.

This is because most of my friends treat their husbands in ways I don’t like. Apart from cheating on their husbands to earn promotion or as prove of their financial autonomy, many of them also use charms to turn their husbands’ attention away from their atrocities.

Because I also did in the past, using such charms to arrest the attention of the men I dated; lure them away from their homes at ungodly hours of the night, get them to spend stupendously on me, I know what so many women out there are doing to men.

I did a rethink when these charms could not make any of them men marry me. The more I tried, the more disappointed I got which eventually made me to confess my sins and change my ways.

It was at that point, I met my husband who is such a wonderful and understanding man.

But, something happened about three weeks ago that is making me apprehensive. To be truthful, I have never lived with any woman who has been supportive of her husband. My mother walked out on my father because he didn’t have the kind of money she wanted to live large. None of my aunties is a first wife. They have multiple husbands.

The kinds of friends I have are also not the kind whose lives I want to emulate any longer.

Although, my husband has severally complained about my attitude to cooking and house keeping, what he said last week really got me worried. He said apart from sex, there was nothing to make him aware he has a woman in the house; that his food is still being cooked by the house-help and the house is still being taken care of by the paid help.

I didn’t realize that his underwears were all dirty. The house help went to see her ailing mother and had to stay an extra week because she couldn’t leave her mother in the condition she met her.

Usually she scouts for his dirty clothes and wash them. Since I had never done such; I didn’t realize he had exhausted all his underwears until that day. I felt bad when he asked of what use a woman is to a man who doesn’t know how to care for her husband.

If I hadn’t made her cook stew and soups for a month before she left, he would also have known I can’t cook.

Agatha, please help me. I really want to be a good woman and wife to him. I just don’t know where to begin or how to go about it especially as I have a career to manage. I don’t have the time to work and still care for the home.

Also, how do I get pregnant before it is too late? In truth he is not complaining but, I don’t want him to, before I get pregnant.

Please help me because I have come to love him very much. If I confide in my mother or friends, I know what they would tell me to do and I sincerely don’t want to even consider their option of using charm to turn blind eyes to my weakness. I want to change also for me.

Tolani

Dear Tolani,

There is no greater teacher like experience. Having lived on the two sides of life, you should by now know which side benefits you the most.

Also, at your age, you should have since realized that nothing in life can be achieved without one form of sacrifice. Your former life required you to part with money to charm men to do your bidding; it was a kind of sacrifice you willing made to keep you happy in that world.

Having made up your mind to change your ways positively, you also have to keep making so many kinds of sacrifices to keep you happy in your new life.

One of such sacrifice is making a choice of what makes you happy the most; your home or career? The life of a woman is in being able to balance all the roles she is expected to play in the life. Apart from being a career woman, you now have a home and husband to care for. At 42, you are in a position to know what works for you the most.

To grow a home isn’t a day’s job; it requires a lot of patience, willingness to adapt, honesty and a combination of prayers and the right attitude to make the home work smoothly.

No matter how busy a woman gets outside her home; her presence must be felt in the house when she is either at home or out by those who live with her. If after a year, the only thing that makes your husband know he has a woman in his house, is the regular sex; then he might as well pay a woman to supply him with that.

Sincerely, the house help has no business cooking his meals or washing his underwears. That is strictly within your jurisdiction. Don’t forget that the house-help has always performed these duties for him. If he were satisfied with that, do you think he would have had a need for you in his life?

The truth is, even if you don’t do it as good as the house-help the fact that you are even trying would give him confidence and peace in his decision to have you in his life. What this man is demanding from you is to try to justify his need of you in his life. Your presence is not just to keep his bed warm; it is also to make him relax and enjoy the comfort only a wife gives to a man.

If he is still eating the food of his house-help a year after he married you; then he really doesn’t have any use of you in his life. Whether you realize it or not; he knows you are not the one cooking his meals because he is accustomed to the taste of his house-help’s cooking. He is getting impatience because you are not even making any attempt to please him as a husband.

Another mistake you are making which unfortunately you don’t realize and which may become your undoing isn’t the fact that you don’t have a child for him but, your inability to water down the memory of his late wife from his sub-consciousness. He married you to give himself a reason to live; to enjoy matrimony and to forget the pains he feels anything he remembers her.

This is the void he has brought you to fill in his life. That you haven’t given him any reason to be happy as a man would make him go back to a time another woman looked after him, cooked his meals, took interest in his personal needs and hygiene.

If you don’t buckle up; you would soon give him all the reasons to be constantly comparing you with his late wife; when that happens, you can bet he would end the marriage as soon as he finds another woman who knows how to be a wife.

Once the house-help comes back, ask her to teach you how to cook. If that would be difficult for you to do; pay someone to come to your house to teach you.

It is better you are mocked now by one person than have the whole world laugh at your inability to sustain your marriage.

Unlike cooking, you don’t need anybody to teach you how to wash clothes. Thank goodness washing machines are not the luxury they were decades ago. Invest in buying one to enable you wash his clothes on demand. It would go a long way in making him happy.

No matter how busy a woman gets; once she makes up her mind on something, there is no stopping her. You can still create time for your home out of your busy schedule if you want to. It is a matter of you knowing what you want the most in life.

Good luck.